Complexity emerges on all scales and is rooted in molecular and atomic level physics

The chemist Ilya Prigogine demonstrated that amino acids, which we know to be the molecules of living organisms, spontaneously emerge from the presumably inorganic chemicals when the conditions are far from equilibrium: Prigogine et al. (1963), ‘Introduction to thermodynamics of irreversible processes’; . This discovery, for which he won the Nobel Prize, demonstrated the unpredictable emergence of order from chaos, a spontaneous state change in the far from equilibrium regime. This far from equilibrium regime, the regime of living matter, is one for which the simple models of reductionist science do not apply. We are left to observe and learn from nature’s methods.

Prigogine and Nicolis observe that our world’s complexity is deeply rooted in our physical world: “Complex behavior no longer appears to be a singularity in the otherwise uneventful history of a physical system. Rather, it is realised that it is deeply rooted into physics, that complexity may emerge and disappear repeatedly as the conditions vary, and even that it can coexist with the more familiar simple static behavior.”

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Prigogine et al., (1985). ‘Self- organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: Towards a Dynamics of Complexity’.; p. 7

Excerpts above from Santen, L. (2021). Holistic engineering and a renewed science of holism for a thriving world